Update 'content/topic/listening-with-the-pandemic.md'

content/topic/listening-with-the-pandemic.md

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 ## The pandemic is not an intermission, it's an opportunity
 
-The water behind a dam holds an immense amount of potential energy. A crack might become a hole might become a break. If legal regulation, public opinion or under-investment has been the dam holding machine listening back from becoming truly pervasive, then SARS-CoV-2 has weakened that structure throughout. Every voice industry startup and tech juggernaut, every streaming platform, every military funded machine diagnostics lab, every automated care industry device manufacturer has been ready and waiting for just this moment to spring into action with a quick technological fix that just so happens to bolster their position [Morozov]. From the perspective of the machine listening industry, the pandemic is a dream come true. It gets to do what it was always going to anyway, only blanketed now in the twin auras of inevitability and social good. 
+The water behind a dam holds an immense amount of potential energy. A crack might become a hole might become a break. If legal regulation, public opinion or under-investment has been the dam holding machine listening back from becoming truly pervasive, then SARS-CoV-2 has weakened that structure throughout. Every voice industry startup and tech juggernaut, every streaming platform, every military funded machine diagnostics lab, every automated care industry device manufacturer has been ready and waiting for just this moment to spring into action with a [quick technological fix](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/tech-coronavirus-surveilance-state-digital-disrupt) that just so happens to bolster their position. From the perspective of the machine listening industry, the pandemic is a dream come true. It gets to do what it was always going to anyway, only blanketed now in the twin auras of inevitability and social good. 
 
-According to one team of researchers from the UK, Germany, Japan and China, machine listening is not just "ready for implementation" but "urgently necessary" in the "fight against COVID-19". In addition to audio diagnostic and "pre-diagnostic" tools, which would aim to diagnose the virus from a person's voice before symptoms had otherwise manifested, they cite as possible use-cases: "automatic recognition of deceptive speech when people are questioned about their recent contacts or whereabouts"; automatic monitoring of "telephone or other spoken conversations", which "together with GPS coordinates from smart phones... could establish real-time spread maps"; acoustic monitoring of "public obedience and discipline in social-distancing", and in hospital settings, of patients' "emotions, eating habits, fatigue, or pain, etc." Finally, "public spaces could be empowered by AI that detects potentially risky settings, which are over-crowded, under-spaced in terms of distance between individuals, and spot potentially COVID-19 affected subjects among the crowd, and whether these and others are wearing a protective mask while speaking." [Schuller et al]
+According to one team of researchers from the UK, Germany, Japan and China, machine listening is not just "ready for implementation" but "urgently necessary" in the "fight against COVID-19". In addition to audio diagnostic and "pre-diagnostic" tools, which would aim to diagnose the virus from a person's voice before symptoms had otherwise manifested, they cite as possible use-cases: "automatic recognition of deceptive speech when people are questioned about their recent contacts or whereabouts"; automatic monitoring of "telephone or other spoken conversations", which "together with GPS coordinates from smart phones... could establish real-time spread maps"; acoustic monitoring of "public obedience and discipline in social-distancing", and in hospital settings, of patients' "emotions, eating habits, fatigue, or pain, etc." Finally, "public spaces could be empowered by AI that detects potentially risky settings, which are over-crowded, under-spaced in terms of distance between individuals, and spot potentially COVID-19 affected subjects among the crowd, and whether these and others are wearing a protective mask while speaking."[^Schuller et al]
 
-If this sounds like a blueprint for intensified surveillance, for even greater capture and control of our sonic worlds, a true panacousticism [Szendy, Vetter], that is apparently not the authors' problem. Important ethical questions exist, they write, which unfortunately "cannot be addressed". They don't say why.
+If this sounds like a blueprint for intensified surveillance, for even greater capture and control of our sonic worlds, a true panacousticism,[^Szendy, Vetter] that is apparently not the authors' problem. Important ethical questions exist, they write, which unfortunately "cannot be addressed". They don't say why.
 
 ## Thoughtlessness
 
-One US company hoping to capitalise on the pandemic sells "voice analytic technologies", which it claims can "vet for fraud, security, and safety risks" with greater than 94% accuracy [website]. All this based on a 2-10 minute long phone call, in which it isn't what you say that matters, but how. Your voice, it is presumed, will betray you. Representation not only can but *should* be bypassed [Andrejevic interview?]. Before the pandemic, this company's products were already available in 13 languages across 12 countries and 23 industries, including to government and military contractors. Today, they also offer “automated telephonic vocal risk assessment” for the determination of fraud in allocating Covid-related welfare and stimulus packages. How the system works, what precisely constitutes "vocal risk" and why, is never explained. It is, after all, proprietary.
+One US company hoping to capitalise on the pandemic sells [voice analytic technologies](https://www.clearspeed.com/technology/"RRA® Remote Risk Assessment"), which it claims can "vet for fraud, security, and safety risks" with greater than 94% accuracy. All this based on a 2-10 minute long phone call, in which it isn't what you say that matters, but how. Your voice, it is presumed, will betray you. Representation not only can but *should* be bypassed. Before the pandemic, this company's products were already available in 13 languages across 12 countries and 23 industries, including to government and military contractors. Today, they also offer “automated telephonic vocal risk assessment” for the determination of fraud in allocating Covid-related welfare and stimulus packages. How the system works, what precisely constitutes "vocal risk" and why, is never explained. It is, after all, proprietary.
 
-This kind of digital snake oil isn't just a function of predatory capitalism and gullible investors. It's also a consequence of machine listening's original wager: that silicon ears [Kidel?] might discern what meat ears  never could [Wark]; that there is a layer of auditory truth beneath or beyond the threshold of human hearing, and that this can be accessed *only* by machinic systems whose workings, in many cases, cannot be reverse engineered or explained to those same human ears.
+This kind of digital snake oil isn't just a function of predatory capitalism and gullible investors. It's also a consequence of machine listening's original wager: that silicon ears might discern what meat ears[^Wark]  never could; that there is a layer of auditory truth beneath or beyond the threshold of human hearing, and that this can be accessed *only* by machinic systems whose workings, in many cases, cannot be reverse engineered or explained to those same human ears.
 
-There is a profound and ramifying "thoughtlessness" here: at once ethical, political, and epistemic [McQuillan]. Once you start down the road that machines might directly audit reality, where to get off? A computational physiognomy of voice becomes so much easier to imagine, sell, and embed [Abu Hamdan].
+There is a profound and ramifying "thoughtlessness" here: at once ethical, political, and epistemic.[^McQuillan] Once you start down the road that machines might directly audit reality, where to get off? A computational physiognomy of voice becomes so much easier to imagine, sell, and embed.
 
 ## Touchlessness
 
 Most of us will experience machine listening as an interface. Say goodbye to spring-mounted keys and clicking mice, maybe soon even the quiet tap of fingers on capacitive glass. "Alexa," we command - or is it ask? - into an airy, expectant atmosphere. ![Touchlessness](audio:static/audio/andrejevic-on-touchlessness.mp3)[^andrejevic] refers first to this invisibility of interface, but it is also "social distancing", remote work, standing no less than 2m apart in a queue for toilet paper, and, in the case of corona voice diagnostics, the idea that computational systems might determine the presence of the virus from the sound of a person's speech or cough. 
 
-There's no evidence yet that such a thing is possible, but many organisations are trying [Voca.ai, Cambridge, MIT, Swizterland, Sonde, Soniphi], and they are thirsty for data. "Donate your voice." "Hit record and read the following sentences while pinching your nose." "Press record and cough three times." [refs, or maybe a video?]
+There's no evidence yet that such a thing is possible, but many organisations are trying [Voca.ai, Cambridge, MIT, Swizterland, Sonde, Soniphi], and they are thirsty for data. ["Donate your voice."](https://www.voiceome.org/covid19/index.html) "Hit record and read the following sentences while pinching your nose." "Press record and cough three times." [refs, or maybe a video?]
 
 Touchless covid diagnosis would make life and labor much safer for primary care workers. It would also be destined for automation and embedding into existing audio systems like telehealth, the smart city, and the smart speakers increasingly found at patients' bedsides [ref]. During a pandemic, where underequipped hospitals, testing centers, workplaces and urban centers are vectors of virus transmission, touchlessness becomes a hygienic imperative as well as an economic one. In a world in which we increasingly understand the air itself as toxic, touchlessness tends towards breathlessness too. After all, smart assistants don't breathe [Andrejevic on Kurzweil's flesh phobia?].
 
@@ -52,4 +52,8 @@ For such an ambient sensing environment to work, this very environment must be d
 
 # Bibliography
 
+[^Schuller et al]: LIBRARY, Schuller et al, COVID-19 and Computer Audition: An Overview on What Speech & Sound Analysis Could Contribute in the SARS-CoV-2 Corona Crisis (2020)
+[^Szendy, Vetter]: LIBRARY, All Ears; The Architecture of Control
+[^Wark]: LIBRARY, Capitalism is Dead
+[^McQuillan]: LIBRARY, Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism
 [^andrejevic]: Interview